After my death our beloved Church abroad will break three ways ... first the Greeks will leave us as they were never a part of us ... then those who live for this world and its glory will go to Moscow ... what will remain will be those souls faithful to Christ and His Church.~St. Philaret of NY

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Western Rites and the “Episcopalianizing” of Orthodoxy

If Satan wrote a handbook, How to Hide Orthodoxy from the Orthodox, I know there would be a chapter on the western rite.

The western rite permits half-baked conversions, they cheat themselves. See here on the home page of the W.R. Critic website, "Two Paths To Two Western Rites", [http://westernritecritic.wordpress.com], one of the steps on the outwardly seemingly "superior" path:

• I can feel at home among the Orthodox

anywhere – the Church is the Church,

and they’re my brothers. But there’s a lot

of stuff in my heterodox background that

I still feel is good and right, and now I see

it’s really part of the ancient Faith.

Western Rites and the “Episcopalianizing” of Orthodoxy

The Marcionites would be happy with what the Western Rite enthusiasts have been trying to achieve. A church within a church, a confession within a confession. This pattern – this template – is the gnostic/masonic/revolutionary template from of old. It creates “unity in diversity” by creating within a religious body another religious body that cannot exist outside it but is in contradiction to that in which it inheres. This has been done to every major religious confession. It’s essentially the translation of universalism and the filioque into an ecclesiological expression.

Observe how it was done with the Episcopal Church. The 1979 prayer book gave us not just two different rites, as the 1928 continued to be used simultaneously in most churches (though, as in this case, proponents kept claiming it was all about rites and rites alone); what it did was elucidate, exacerbate, and continue producing two religious cultures, one within the other, but each in contradiction to the other (despite the harmony the enthusiasts would claim). Even the most optimistic glossers of those events now can scarcely deny that the chickens of contradiction have come home to roost. In the early morning hours, the high-church protestant wing, adhering to the ’28 books, would show up to say the spoken prayers. In the later hours, the quasi-catholic wing, to whom the ’79 book and its culture were now effectively glued, showed up with its charismatic converts to sing the new writ (the former would show up to vigils and such, too). And so the holders of the old way were forced into an ever more Protestant mold, while the holders of the catholic way were melded to the new movement. Effectively, this coopted, compromised, and weakened both.

And so tensions that were already there were exacerbated in the extreme, leading to the present troubles. The 28ers began to lose their catholicity for the sake of their Anglicanism, as they left in droves for Continuing groups. The 79ers, offering the heroic myth of a return to ancient practices, found their “catholicity” in indeed embracing all, but therefore putting them at odds with their own moral standards, and so further dividing them. You can’t embrace everything without becoming nothing. When you’re self-definition is open-ended, people will throw a lot of garbage into it. Defections from each ‘canonical’ group to the other became rampant, satisfying neither the leaving nor the receiving parties. The “Continuing” solution, of freezing the religious assets, as it were, simply created little museums dedicated to a myth of purity and the golden age. Now two great myths collided and fed on one another.

In effect, the complete fragmentation of Anglicanism we are currently witnessing is leading not to the end of Anglicanism, but the transformation of it into a faceless goo that is the raw material to be reformatted into something altogether new – something that prepares it for a more global apostasy. And none of its splinters, or splinters within splinters, whether they be in communion or contradistinction, admit fully what has happened.

It’s not a long leap to looking at the same template in relation to the Western Rite and so-called Byzantine Rite. The ’79 and ’28 prayer books overlay quite neatly. It’s “just about rites”, right? We even have the attendant claims of “returns to more ancient practices” and “embracing the culture that surrounds us” – same things the Episcopalians were saying and many now rue – when they’re dealing in reality at all. But one doesn’t even have to squint to see all the rhetoric about a shift in religious culture being trumpeted by Western Rite enthusiasts in one place while simultaneously denied with shrugs and protests in another. This template is that template. The necessary stages in the preparation of any amalgum include a distillation, a simplification, and extraction of the right isotope to define the necessary parts going into the new whole.

One needn’t even mention that this same alchemical process went to work on the great Protestant confessions, and didn’t have far to run to distill them into elements more akin to an ultra-fragmented fundamentalism in some cases, something like episcopalianism in others, and an ultra-refined generic mega-church (a kind of religious androgyny) in the rest.

If you want to see the future of “Orthodoxy” in the vision of those making the most enthusiastic noise about “Western Rites”, you have only to look around you at the crumbling pillars of Rome and her children. The very religiosity into which they wish to initiate us is being boiled down, and our participation will be courted as the ‘recovery’ of something lost (merely an earlier stage in the process) and the ‘purification’ of what was fundamentally fine (a different stew than our fathers ever knew). We are being asked to embrace a new Orthodoxy, a traditional Orthodoxy, and a continuing Orthodoxy, all within the same confession. We are being asked to become Episcopalians in culture and Orthodox in name.

So-called “Western Orthodoxy” is merely a symbol of this process and a symptom of the new order being formed, a different ecclesiology, a pseudo-ekklesia. In and of itself, it certainly has significant problems, many of which have been rather universally recognized. In terms of what its progress is telling us about the contemporary Orthodox movement (and the very fact that it is movement, and can no longer be considered static or a state – and so now has much in common with the Episcopalian experience) — in those terms, it points to much larger problems that are as yet, just as with the Episcopalians, not widely or fully acknowledged. This despite the countless warnings of monastic communities, ascetic saints, Orthodox prophets, and holy martyrs. Lord have mercy.

You’d think the Episcopalians would like what these folk are up to, but anyone that has suffered what many of them have, through this process, could only look at it with sadness, and perhaps a will to help us fight it. The ones chasing it like a grail are those ‘true believers’ who still think the key problems are gays and women priests, and miss the point entirely. For them, an Episcopalianized Orthodoxy, especially a Western Orthodoxy, is a mirage, and they’re greedily gulping down what many of us recognize as sand. The sad thing is that we are feeding it to them, in the name of disseminating the Faith. This can only happen when we have begun to lose our Faith the same way they did: Quite literally by losing The Faith.

The Marcionites, Masons, and Revolutionaries should be happy, but no one else will be. Not when, instead of coming home to roost, our dove departs for the last time.

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THE SISTER CHURCHES

The True Orthodox Churches of Romania, and Bulgaria, and with the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, and with the Synod in Resistance, are called by the Grace of the Lord to coexist in Mysteriological communion.

from §4 of “Schedule of Steps in the Union Process” Feb. 2014

VL AGAFANGEL PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Theotokos and all the Saints: keep our souls unharmed from the destructive influences of globalism, ecumenism, and sergianism, and give all of us the strength to endure the latest onset of persecution of the Church of Christ. Amen

QUOTE

"I have taken you in my arms, and I love you, and I prefer you to my life itself. For the present life is nothing, and my most ardent dream is to spend it with you... I place your love above all things, and nothing would be more bitter or painful to me than to be of a different mind than you.”

St. John Chrysostom

QUOTE

"If we have a good priest (or bishop), we give thanks to God. If a bad one, we endure him".

- old Russian saying

QUOTE

"And here is something to which I would like to draw your attention to – something about which very many do not think about. Father Archimandrite Constantine, whom probably many of you know, the reposed editor of the journal “Orthodox Rus’”, a profound Christian mind, considered that the most terrible among all the achievements of the communists was that the communists created their own false-church, a soviet church which they shoved onto the unfortunate people in place of the genuine Church which went underground into the catacombs. Do not think that I am exaggerating or that Father Constantine was exaggerating!

Once, in the year 1918, a Pan-Russian Church Council was held. At this Council, the entire Pan-Russian Church together with its first holy hierarch, Patriarch Tikhon anathematized, excommunicated from the Church not only the theomachists and godless ones themselves, but also all those who would collaborate with them."

~St. Philaret of NY

QUOTE

"To the Russians abroad, it has been granted to shine in the whole world with the light of Orthodoxy, so that other peoples, seeing their good deeds, might glorify our Father Who is in heaven, and thus obtain salvation for themselves. But if it does not perform this purpose and even abases Orthodoxy by its life, the Diaspora will have before itself two paths: either to be converted to the path of repentance, having acquired forgiveness through prayer to God and being reborn spiritually and to being capable of giving rebirth to our suffering homeland; or else being rejected by God and remaining in banishment, persecuted by everyone, until gradually it will degenerate and disappear from the face of the earth."

from Vladika John's report to the All-Diaspora Sobor in 1938

QUOTE

The apostasy of our times, to a degree unique in Christian history, is proceeding not primarily by false teachings or canonical deviations, but rather by a false understanding of Orthodoxy on the part of those who may even be perfectly Orthodox in their dogmatic teaching and canonical situation. A correct "Orthodoxy" deprived of the Spirit of true Christianity—this is the meaning of Sergianism, and it cannot be fought by calling it a "heresy," which it is not, nor by detailing its canonical irregularities, which are only incidental to something much more important.

- Russia's Catacomb Saints

QUOTE

Let it not be thought, however, that I affirm that it is necessary to prize every peace. For I know that there is a splendid disagreement and the most destructive unanimity. Yet one must love a good peace which has a good purpose: unity with God.

-St. Gregory the Theologian

QUOTE

... To pious Christians the fact that the world has fallen into godlessness is to them obvious, and they are ready to see it as an unfortunate historical inevitability ...

Professor Viktor Trostinkov

QUOTE

If you want to have assurance that you are saved, repent now that you are young and healthy and it is manifest that you left sin while you were still able to sin. But if you persevere in sin into your old age, why then you did not leave sin, but rather sin left you.

St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain

QUOTE

Live in peace not only with your friends, but also with your enemies; but only your personal enemies, and not the enemies of God.

St. Theodosius of the Kiev Caves

QUOTE

Judge not according to appearances, but judge righteous judgment.

St. John 7:24

QUOTE

"If Russia is not ressurrected, a new Golgotha threatens the whole world."

Priest Vladimir Evsukoff 1980†

QUOTE

A man who does not express a desire to link himself to the latest of the saints (in time) in all love and humility owing to a certain distrust in himself, will never be linked to the preceding saints and will not be admitted to their succession, even though he thinks he possesses all possible faith and love for God and for all His saints. He will be cast out of their midst, as one who refused to take humbly the place allotted to him by God before all time, and to link himself to that latest saint (in time) as God had disposed.

St. Symeon the New Theologian

QUOTE

SCOBA, to which world orthodoxy gives such great significance, reproaching us for not belonging to it, actually is in no way a canonical organ. The Russian Church Outside of Russia was invited to take part in these conferences; however, our Church refused to send representatives there after clergy of the Moscow Patriarchate were invited. "We never and nowhere will sit at one table with them; by this our spiritual communion with the Universal Church is not broken."

Archpriest George Grabbe 1969

QUOTE

"Let us always thank the Lord that we are in the Holy Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, which throughout the 80 years of its existence has trodden the straight, royal path of God, without ever turning aside and losing its way."

QUOTE

The passions lying hidden in the soul provide the demons with the means of arousing impassioned thoughts in us. Then, fighting the intellect through these thoughts, they force it to give its assent to sin. When it has been overcome, they lead it to sin in the mind; and when this has been done they induce it, captive as it is, to commit the sin in action. Having thus desolated the soul by means of these thoughts, the demons then retreat, taking the thoughts with them, and only the spectre or idol of sin remains in the intellect. Referring to this our Lord says, 'When you see the abominable idol of desolation standing in the holy place (let him who reads understand)... (Matt 24:15). For man's intellect is a holy place and a temple of God in which the demons, having desolated the soul by impassioned thoughts, set up the idol of sin. That these things have already taken place in history no one, I think, who has read Josephus will doubt; though some say that they will also come to pass in the time of the Antichrist.

Philokalia

QUOTE

There are three things that impel us towards what is holy: natural instincts, angelic powers, and probity of intention. Natural instincts impel us, when, for example, we do to others what we would wish them to do to us (cf. Luke 6:31), or when we see someone suffering deprivation or in need and naturally feel compassion. Angelic powers impel us when, being ourselves impelled to something worthwhile, we find we are providentially helped and guided. We are impelled by probity of intention when, discriminating between good and evil, we choose the good.

Philokalia

QUOTE

The outward Gospel of social idealism is a symptom of loss of faith.

Fr. Seraphim Rose

QUOTE

Impurity of intellect consists first in having false knowledge, ...

Philokalia

QUOTE

Isn't Marx really the third of a trio with Darwin and Freud as a practical source in the war against revealed truth?

Fr. Seraphim Rose

Letters, 1972

QUOTE

QUOTE

To: ROCA members from the MP

"You have to understand that you have long been in a false church, which implants in its members' souls, a false spirituality, which in turn takes root and grows stronger and stronger, the longer a man stays in it."

Bishop Athanasius, 2014

QUOTE

Mankind has gone mad, and we see with horror the abyss into which it is being drawn. Let us lay aside every worldly care, and let us fall down in prayer and readiness for the dread Judgment of the Lord. Death will not come with bombs and poisons. Death has already come and take up residence with us and in us, and has made corpses of us, Mammon has overwhelmed this sinful world, which is dominated by Queen Science, Lucifer himself, which with one hand makes medicines and machines for man's foolish happiness and with the other terrorizes him by means of the bomb! Such is the sorry state of knowledge and the agony of the world through and through. Let us lift up our hearts.

-Photios Kontoglou (†1965) letter to Dr. Cavarnos dated 5/10/57

QUOTE

"Psychopaths are a superior subspecies. We transcend humanity. We are Nature's Supermen. We deserve the subservience and availability of everyone around us. Luckily, every year 100-million people are born throughout the world. We have 100-million new choices every year."

-Sam Vaknin, self-realized psychopath

QUOTE

Our Saviour placed the Church in the world in order to save the world, and Satan is always trying to place the world into the Church in order to destroy the Church.

attributed to Desert Fathers

QUOTE

"If you see lying and hypocrisy, expose them in front of all, even if they are clothed inpurple and fine linen."

Metropolitan Anastasy (Gribanovsky) of New York (1906)

HALL OF SHAME

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